- 2: 12/23, so it’s Festivus; the last day of Saturnalia; and now, according to a front page story in today’s New York Times (“In Some Parts, It’s Christmas Adam Before Eve: Churches Are Adding Day to the Holiday, With a Side of Ribs”), it’s Christmas Adam, the day before Christmas Eve (it’s a joke, son)
Meanwhile, today’s found mantra is Zesty Pickle — repeat as needed until you reach the desired state of tangy pungency. It came to me in a commercial for Chick-Fil-A’s classic chicken sandwich:
Crispy chicken, zesty pickle, it’s tough to top the original
But then the piquant phallicity of zesty pickles pushed me onto another path, into the tale of a fickle fly:
zesty pickle
frisky pepper
pesky stuck zipper!
… no plucky pickles past this point
(#1) The pickle-pepper tale
The prevalence of zesty pickles. They are everywhere, offering us zesty ‘piquant, peppery, pungent, spicy, tangy, tasty’. First, that Chick-Fil-A commercial:
(#2) The chicken sandwich in the ad
(#3) And the zesty pickle
And then the Vlasic zesty dills:
(#4) [from the Vlasic site:] Packed with classic dill taste and the crunch you know and love, there are so many ways to enjoy these Vlasic® zesty whole dill pickles. Plus, they’re flavored with garlic and red pepper flakes for an extra kick. Try them whole as a low-calorie salty snack, or slice them up for sandwiches or barbecues.
Plenty of other companies offer zesty pickles.
Exploiting the phallicity of pickles. And (chile) peppers. And cucumbers. And more. From my 7/29/22 posting “Many a pickle packs a puckle”
Pickles are automatically phallicity territory, and the Pacific Pickle Works in Santa Barbara CA (website here) doesn’t shy away from their penis potential, augmenting it by references to phallic carrots, asparagus spears, and unpickled cucumbers. If you have the eye for it, we all live in Penis Town.
… The company’s own copy, heavy with word-initial /p/ and vivid word choices, generally evoking the picture of PPW as a place of fun, fun, fun (till some meanie takes the pickles away)
A note on chile peppers. From Wikipedia:
(#5) Food Network chart of heat levels in some chile peppers (with a (sweet) bell pepper for comparison)Chili peppers, also spelled chile or chilli, are varieties of berry-fruit plants from the genus Capsicum, which are members of the nightshade family Solanaceae, cultivated for their pungency. Chili peppers are widely used in many cuisines as a spice to add “heat” to dishes. Capsaicin and the related capsaicinoids give chili peppers their intensity when ingested or applied topically.
Chile peppers are generally as phallic as pickles, so pickles and peppers come together in:
The pickle-pepper tale in #1. Which introduces a not uncommon vexation of modern clothing, the stuck zipper fly. Which, in my telling, prevents the zesty pickles and frisky peppers from escaping the wearer’s jeans to unleash their extreme flavors and raunchy symbolism on the world outside those jeans.
My title. A play on a song title. From Wikipedia:
“Stuck in the Middle with You” (sometimes known as “Stuck in the Middle”) is a song [released in 1973] written by Scottish musicians Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan and performed by their band Stealers Wheel.
… Rafferty’s lyrics are a dismissive tale of a music industry cocktail party (the clowns and jokers would be all the music executives and hangers on), written and performed as a parody of Bob Dylan’s style